Luddites weren't stopping industrial revolution. They were fighting against mass layoffs, against dramatic lowering of wages and against replacement of skilled workers with unskilled ones. Now this reminds me of something, hmmm...

Did the Dutch ever have a chance to stop the massive run up in tulip prices?

It's easy to say what was inevitable when you are looking into the past. Much harder to predict what inevitable future awaits us.

It's interesting that the Dutch actually had more success at stopping the actual tide coming in than controlling a market tide (which was more like a tidal wave I suppose).

One is external, the other exists within. A literal tidal wave is a problem for everyone; a market tide is - by definition - an opportunity to many.

No, but software engineers for example have more power, even in an employer's market, than Luddites.

You can simply spend so much time on meticulously documenting that "AI" (unfortunately!) does not work that it will be quietly abandoned.

Software engineers have less power than we'd like to think; we may be paid a lot relative to the baseline, but for vast majority that's not even in the "rich" range anymore, and more importantly, we're not ones calling the shots - not anymore.

But even if, that presupposes a kind of unity of opinion, committing the exact same sin the article we're discussing is complaining about. Many engineers believe that AI does, in fact, work, and will keep getting better - and will work towards the future you'd like to work against.

The exact same sin? It seems that you don't go off message even once:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44568811

The article is wrong though :). It's because people make choices, that this future is inevitable - enough people are independently choosing to embrace LLMs because of a real or perceived value. That, as well as the (real and perceived) reasons for it are plain and apparent, so it's not hard to predict where this leads in aggregate.

The luddites or at least some of them threatened employers, factories and/or machinery with physical aggression. They lived in the locations where these industries for a long time remained tho automation certainly made the industry more mobile. Like unions they used collective bargaining power in part derived from their geographic location and presence among each other.

A Guatemalan or Indian can write code for my boss today...instead of me. Software engineers despite the cliff in employment and the like are still rather well paid and there's plenty of room to undercut and for people to disregard principles. If this is perceived to be an issue to them at all. If you talk to many irl... Well it is not in the slightest.

No one will read that documentation. And by the time you finish writing it, the frontier AI models will have improved.

The Luddites were among the precursors to Marx et al.; even a revolution wasn't enough to hold back industrialisation, and even that revolution had a famous example of the exact kind of resource-distribution failure that Marx would have had in mind when writing (Great Famine in Ireland was contemporaneous with the Manifesto, compare with Holodomor).

What? Can you elaborate?

The dutch have walls/dams that keep the ocean away.